What was once an attractive home service solution with a wealth
of hardware partners has, in essence, become an unsightly pest for
many. Until a solution is found, use of WHS brings with it serious risks
of data corruption -- something many consider to be a cardinal sin of
networking hardware or software.

One DailyTech reader, Tim Slocum from Roscoe, Illinois, contacted us
a couple weeks back with a rather incredible personal story of data loss, which
he hoped would serve as a warning to others. Slocum was an eager WHS user
and states that he copied 16,000+ family pictures and videos to the
system. Around Christmas he discovered that many of these files had
become corrupted. He rebuilt and reformatted the system, only to
experience unpleasantly surprising results.

Slocum states in an email to DailyTech, "I then reformatted and
rebuilt the system with NO ADD-INS or extra software. Copied all photos to the
server, setup PC backups, and let the system sit with no usage because of the
lack of trust. This weekend I again noticed photos are now corrupted."

Slocum acknowledges that a family member who works for MS as a consultant has had
no issues that he knows of, though he planned on emailing him to verify
this. Slocum adds that while not a "real techie" he is fairly
knowledgeable. He states, "I have been a developer for over 20
years ... last 2-3 have been moving into VB.NET. So I have some knowledge
of testing and have built PC's in the past."

Having worked hard to stabilize his system, Slocum plans to continue his efforts
with a third build, turning off file duplication, which reportedly may affect
the likelihood of occurrence. Tim feels that WHS is a promising product,
but Microsoft is failing to take its issues seriously enough.

The really surprising part of Slocum's story at the time DailyTech received
it was that he did not edit the files. While some users had alleged
corruption on transfers in unverified reports floating around the internet,
previously, Microsoft stated that corruption only occurred when editing files.

Now Microsoft says the problem is that the underpinnings of WHS are broken, and that a fix
is required at a very low level. This will take a good deal of time to
develop and validate, according to the WHS Team at Microsoft. The WHS Team
hopes to release beta versions of a patch over following months, but states
that June is the soonest a finished patch might appear.

The WHS Team also warns that some users are mistaking other problems for the
issue. Says the Team, "Some of the instances that were initially
attributed to this issue ended up being something else, such as a faulty
network card/driver, old routers with outdated firmware, or people incorrectly
testing the limits of their home servers."

However the Team did not rule that the WHS may have other problems causing
trouble on a low level, though they state that they feel very confident that
they understand the underlying issue that’s currently causing the main known
problem.

And it turns out that Slocum was correct -- the knowledgebase article has just
been updated to encompass file transfers. The new knowledge base article
also has additional information on the cause -- how the NFTS file system, the
cache, and the memory manager can get out of whack and beginning eating up user
data. The article explains it thusly:

Windows Home Server uses a file system mini-filter driver in
addition to the NTFS file system to implement Shared Folders storage
technology. File system mini-filter drivers are an extensibility mechanism that
is provided by Windows to enable storage scenarios. For distributing data
across the different hard drives that are managed by Windows Home Server, the
Windows Home Server mini-filter driver redirects I/O between files that are
stored on the main hard drive and files that are stored on other hard drives.
This redirection mechanism is enabled only when Windows Home Server is managing
the Shared Folder storage of multiple physical hard drives. A bug has been
discovered in the redirection mechanism which, in certain cases, depending on
application use patterns, timing, and workload, may cause interactions between
NTFS, the Memory Manager, and the Cache Manager to get out of sync.

While the Windows Home Server Team is working hard to have a fix ready by
summer time, in the meantime WHS users are left with the unpleasant reality
that editing or storing files on the server may lead to corruption. And
with the scope of the flaws in WHS's low level file handling growing weekly,
like a certain hungry caterpillar; it leaves one to wonder whether there are more
aspects of the problem yet to be discovered.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

quote: Just point your browser over to www.distrowatch.com and pick from the many capable Operating Systems that are available, at least until MS gets the bugs ironed out of WHS.

So a few questions...

How do I go about streaming videos to my XBox 360?What menu sets up the remote file access without having to deal with any DNS info for my dynamic IP?Is there a tool that runs in my Windows system tray that keeps me updated of the status of my automated nightly backups?

I'd also prefer that the setup for all of this functionality take less than 5 minutes.